Articles

Prior to the appointment of ‘Grimmy’ (never was a nickname more appropriate to a situation) the controller of BBC Radio One, the 42 year old Ben Cooper, essentially told anyone over 30 who listened to his station to ‘do one’. These festival dads were not the people his remit said he should have listening to his station so, despite the station being part of a publicly funded body, those folk were no longer welcome. Off to the ghetto of 6 Music (good job they didn’t close that eh?) or Radio 2 with you. »

We are living through a commodification of taste that drives a fracturing of the appreciation of art for short term financial gain.... As part of its new Open Graph app platform, Facebook has partnered with a host of music companies to bring real-time music streaming and discovery to the timeline. The Insider, ponders what this means for music, and for you. »

When two things collide sometimes it just really gets to you. For me, those two things this week were
the Mercury Music Prize and the Review show / Newsnight Review / whatever they’ve rebranded it
to with a panel of ‘experts’ discussing whether the music industry was up the shitter on Friday night.
Paul Morley, Krissi Murison, Tom Service (Guardian classical music editor) and Miranda Sawyer shouted
over each other, deferred to Paul Morley’s endless endless banging on about Marx / Philip Glass /
anything else that makes him sound like the preening egotist he truly is for 45 minutes interspersed
with the thoughts of Chairman Mills (Beggars Group) and some other industry types on the Mercury
red carpet who, surprisingly, decided that the music industry isn’t dead. Oh, and Dave Ellis got some
face time to claim T In The Park (founded 1994) as one of the ‘original’ festivals. Jesus. This followed
reams of tedious opinions about how The XX (sorry, theallinlowercasexx) were the ‘dull but right’ choice for the Mercury. Yawn.»